Hike & Bike Map in KDE Applications 4.5.1 / Marble 0.10.1

KDE * 4.5.1 has been tagged last week and should be available from your friendly distribution soon. Alongside some bugfixes for Marble, Bernhard Beschow added a new feature: Alpha blending joins the list of supported blending types in layers which Jens-Michael Hoffmann implemented for Marble 0.10. Just in time for our latest map theme addition: The Hike & Bike Map, contributed by Colin Marquardt, available now via the New Stuff feature (File => Download Maps in Marble). Let’s take a look at it in all its glory:

Notice how the hillshading — activated via the checkbox in the Legend on the left — gives a nice terrain impression. This is where alpha blending comes in. Hillshading won’t work with Marble 0.10.0 because alpha blending is not available there yet. Of course the Hike & Bike Map can also be used in conjunction with our Maemo version on the Nokia N900:

If you look closely at the screenshot, you’ll notice another new feature in the Routing department: Monav can now be used as an alternative offline router. In contrast to the Hike & Bike Map, this feature is not available in the 4.5 / 0.10 series of Marble though.

Adding yet another offline router is justified by both gosmore and routino being unable to calculate longer routes on the N900. Monav is able to calculate a route of 250 km in less than two seconds on my N900 – with the potential to do it even faster in the future. Different transport types, turn restrictions and driving instructions are not supported yet, so it cannot be used as a full replacement for the others at this time.

The two screenshots are taken from SVN trunk btw. Can you spot the new features added by our three GSOC students?

The hillshading can actually be applied to any of the other map tiles, but apparently there is no easy way to hook it up to “foreign” DGML files – maybe such tiles plus overlays would could use special handing in Marble like there is for the cloud layer.